Traffic safety has always been the first priority of traffic management authorities. In order to allow drivers to drive safely and pedestrians to walk peacefully, there are many road safety propagandas appeared in daily life to remind everyone. However, most traffic fatalities are often caused by drunk driving, drug abuse, fatigue or sudden discomfort of the body so that people cannot focus on driving. The results often cause unbearable suffering for many families. Therefore, in order to solve the man-made traffic safety problems, many traffic safety aids or systems related to the traffic safety have emerged.
Conventionally, vehicles may be installed with ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System). The system can detect certain objects and perform a basic classification to warn the driver of the dangerous conditions on the road. Furthermore, it can slow down or stop the vehicle under some emergency situations. The ADAS can be properly used to monitor blind spots and assist in lane changes to show warnings for front impacts. However, the vehicles are still controlled by the drivers. If the driver's mental state during driving is not good, they may still be in danger of driving the vehicle without following the instructions of the ADAS. In addition, the concept of smart cars is gradually being carried out. These smart cars are capable of deep learning and application of driver habits, driving environments, and even traffic regulations. In other words, a safe driving system with relevant intelligent learning functions, in the case of familiar with the traffic conditions, can replace the driver to drive by itself. However, no matter how advanced and developed this technology will be in the future, the innate pursuit of a sense of speed by human beings and the belief that the computer system cannot be absolutely stable and error-free both make man-made driving is a necessity. Once involved in human control, the drivers' physiological and mental status are again the key to traffic safety.
From the technical point of view, the aforementioned technologies are still under development, or only with the prototypes. In addition, the governments of all countries in the world still wait and see. There is no timetable for legislation and implementation of traffic laws related to the above technologies. At this stage, there are still many available driving safety assistive technologies. In particularly, a technology which can monitor the drivers' physiological status is a revolutionary and breakthrough technology. The technology is mainly to detect the driver's Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and check if it is suitable for driving or not. HRV is the degree to which the frequency of heart beats varies over a time interval. When human's HRV at high level, they would have more attention to ignore distractions. On the contrary, human would reduce attention when their physiology or awareness was interfered. Therefore the negative emotions like anxiety, anger, melancholy etc. would reduce the HRV easily. Especially after drinking, taking drugs or being fatigue want to sleep, the HRV would decrease sharply than negative emotions caused. The above arguments have been confirmed in various scientific journals and proved by physiological experiments. The scientific journals such as “Acute alcohol ingestion reduces Heart Rate Variability”, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Elsevier Scientific Publishers Ireland Ltd., 1986; “Acute alcohol intake decreases short-term Heart Rate Variability in healthy subjects”, Clinical Science, 1994; “Relations between alcohol consumption, Heart Rate, and Heart Rate Variability in men”, National Institutes of Health (NIH), 2002; “Fatigue Shifts and Scatters Heart Rate Variability in Elite Endurance Athletes”, National Institutes of Health (NIH), 2013 and “Heart Rate Variability and the Efficacy of Biofeedback in Heroin Users with Depressive Symptoms”, The Korean College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2016.
In practice, there are many HRV modules available for use. For example, the module “SFH 7050—Photo Plethysmoraphy (PPG) Sensor” manufactured by Osram. The device's dimensions about 4.7×2.5×0.9 (L×W×H) mm. It has a very small size and high accuracy that can make the function of detecting HRV be assembled on any portable electronic products, such as smart watches. This kind of device makes the detection of HRV become more convenient. If the module for detecting HRV could be applied to the safe driving system, it could warn drivers if their physiological status were not suitable for driving. In currently, there absolutely not have any applications which can detect HRV in safe driving systems.
Therefore, based on many years of research and development on the safe driving system of vehicles and many experiments on the physiological conditions of drivers. In practical experience in integration of hardware and software of electronic devices, the present inventor has provided the safe driving system having function of detecting HRV. It not only breaks through the limitations of existing traffic environments and driving habits at once, but also contributes great efforts to safety driving. Moreover, the safe driving system having function of detecting HRV can exert the anti-theft function by identifying the unique HRV of each person to prevent the vehicles' owners from theft events.